When you need to discuss a private matter with several people, start a PM (private message) topic with one of them. You will see that you can add additional users to the PM topic as you are composing the initial message.

You cannot (yet?) add additional members to an existing PM topic, unless you are an administrator on that Discourse forum.

To start a PM, go to the user page of the user you wish to invite, and click the “Private Message” button that appears below their avatar. To add additional users, type the first few letters of the user name in the text box “Add a user”, then select the user from the autocomplete box, or type their full username.

While I think group messaging kicks serious ass, I think it has a couple serious flaws, unless I’m overlooking something.

In our community, we have a few users that will start a large private messaging group and use it as sort of a private chatroom. This leads to users that have automatically been added to this room to have sometimes hundreds of notifications in which the only way to clear them is to actually scroll through all of the private messages, which is very glitchy.

The second issue is that it’s seemingly impossible to remove oneself from a private message group.

My initial thoughts would be to have a ‘mark all as read’ option within private message views as well as a ‘leave conversation’ button visible in private message parties of 3 or more individuals.

I don’t know about all that, but I do know notifications need to be rolled up.

If there are 10 replies in a PM you are on, you get… 10 notifications:

joe replied to "hay guyyyz here is a PM"
dave replied to "hay guyyz here is a PM"
ed replied to "hay guyyz here is a PM"
sally replied to "hay guyyz here is a PM"
frank replied to "hay guyyz here is a PM"
xavier replied to "hay guyyz here is a PM"
mondo replied to “hay guyyz here is a PM”

That is … bullshit. It should roll up to

10 people replied to “hay guyyz here is a PM”

That’s the #1 thing I want to work on here first before anything else. And it will help topics too for the same reason – start a topic that gets 10 replies, and … you get 10 notifications. Yay.

We only want to work on a “mark all read” as an absolute last resort, in some ways we see it as throwing in the towel and giving up.

So before we give up.

I think it is totally legit to be allowed to opt out of a PM as a user, I think the cleanest way to do this is to allow users to select between “Watching” and “Mute” on and pm. If a user mutes a PM that information should be visible to the group.

As to the rolling up of messages, @codinghorror already addressed, we really really need to roll up our notifications.

I also don’t really see a problem with letting people remove themselves from PMs. If they are not the owner, show their name with a little (X) next to it, and they can click the (X) to remove themselves from that PM. PM owners can of course remove anyone from the PM in the same manner.

However this means the person would no longer have access to the PM since that’s an access list.

Probably we should have the standard topic notification button control at the bottom (mute, regular, etc), even on a PM. We scrapped this at launch due to lack of time.

I don’t know about all that, but I do know notifications need to be rolled up.

sam:

I think it is totally legit to be allowed to opt out of a PM as a user, I think the cleanest way to do this is to allow users to select between “Watching” and “Mute” on and pm. If a user mutes a PM that information should be visible to the group.

Thanks for the quick response as usual guys. The proposed solutions would work perfectly for us.

However this means the person would no longer have access to the PM since that’s an access list.

It would be great if PM participants could be added at-will, like in Google Waves. So say I start a PM between me and you, and 4 messages in we realize this conversation is relevant to sam as well, so as the PM sender (or you as well, if you were admin) I could just include sam into that conversation as if he’d always been there.

I think it should happen in parallel with being allowed to add multiple respondents. That would be the easiest way to discover it once it’s available. Right now multiple respondents appears to be available from trust level 0 though.

As part of Discourse 1.5 we have built support for “first class” group mentions and messaging.
Out-of-the-box nobody can send messages to groups or trigger mention notifications.
On the admin group page at site.com/admin/groups you can select “Who can message and @mention this group?”
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Additionally you may select which groups are visible to user using the “Group is visible to all users” checkbox.
Mentioning groups
When users perform “autocomplete” using the @ key all visible …